Lost Opportunities At Christmas

Steve Hays recently linked to a good post by Ken Samples about reasons to like the Christmas season. I agree with Samples as far as he goes. But I would add some other points that come to mind, particularly as an apologist.

In contexts like evangelism, apologetics, and teaching theology, the Christmas season gives us opportunities we don't often have:

"The stories of Jesus's birth are the foundation of the world's most widely observed holiday. Christmas is celebrated by the world's two billion Christians, a number about twice that of the next largest religion, Islam. Moreover, because of the cultural and commercial importance of Christmas in Western culture and beyond, it is observed by many non-Christians as well. Indeed, no other religious holiday is so widely commemorated by people who are outside of the tradition that originated it....Indeed, in contemporary Western culture and even for many Christians, the commemoration of Christmas exceeds the commemoration of Easter. Because of the importance of Christmas, how we understand the stories of Jesus's birth matters. What we think they're about - how we hear them, read them, interpret them - matters. They are often sentimentalized. And, of course, there is emotional power in them. They touch the deepest of human yearnings...Moreover, for many Christians, they are associated with their earliest memories of childhood. Christmas has emotional power....They [the infancy narratives] speak of personal and political transformation." (John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, The First Christmas [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007], vii-viii)

There are opportunities at Christmas time that we rarely or never have on other occasions: a culturally accepted tradition of sending Christmas cards with theological content, church services that are attended by unusually large numbers of people, etc.

Christians often associate Easter with apologetics, since we have such good evidence for Jesus' resurrection. That's appropriate. But the apologetic significance of Christmas is remarkably underestimated. Even among Christian scholars and apologists, the subject tends to be neglected.

I'll mention a couple of examples of the apologetic significance I'm referring to. There were a lot of differing Messianic expectations in ancient Israel, but two themes that were widely agreed upon were that the Messiah would be a descendant of David and that he would come from Bethlehem. If Jesus fulfilled those expectations, that has some evidential significance. I've argued elsewhere that He did fulfill both. See here and here, for example. To get some idea of how significant the evidence is on these matters, read Raymond Brown's treatment of the two topics in The Birth Of The Messiah (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999), 505-516. Brown held a liberal view of the infancy narratives, but he granted much of what a conservative would argue on Jesus' Davidic ancestry and birthplace.

But how many conservative Christians ever discuss that sort of evidence for issues surrounding Jesus' birth? Instead, we get a lot of Christmas decorations, Christmas plays, sermons about what good role models Joseph and Mary are, Christmas music videos posted at Christian blogs, etc. Apologetics receives little attention in the context of Christmas. It seems that most pastors would rather preach their thirteenth or twenty-ninth sermon about Mary or the shepherds rather than preach even a single sermon that discusses in depth something like Jesus' prophecy fulfillment or the historicity of the infancy narratives. There isn't even much interest in Christmas apologetics among apologists.

Given the significance of the opportunities we have during the Christmas season, we ought to reconsider what we're doing with those opportunities. If your use of the Christmas season doesn't look much different than the surrounding culture's, or even what we usually see in Evangelical circles, then something's wrong with you.